Artificial Superpowers | Lihong Hicken | Ep. 83

[Lihong] (0:00 - 0:10)

One of the common ones that, oh, customer success is the extension of our product team. It basically means you're a product sh** and then you need customer success to come swipe your ass, right? It's kind of like that.

[Dillon] (0:17 - 0:20)

All right, let's kick it off. Ready? Let's do it.

[Lihong] (0:20 - 0:21)

Let's do it.

[Dillon] (0:22 - 0:34)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:34 - 0:35)

What's up, everybody?

[Dillon] (0:36 - 0:39)

And we've got Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:40 - 0:40)

What's up, lifers?

[Dillon] (0:41 - 0:45)

And we have Lihong here. Lihong, will you say hi, please?

[Lihong] (0:46 - 0:47)

Yo, hi, everyone.

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:57)

I know my voice cracked, JP. You're laughing at me. I try to keep it dynamic.

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Lihong, thank you so much for being here.

Can you introduce yourself, please?

[Lihong] (0:58 - 1:06)

Sure. I'm Lihong Hickam, co-founder and CEO of Vayset, and I call ourselves the world's first conversational AI survey.

[Dillon] (1:08 - 1:22)

I love it. And we need that. Surveys are a little stale these days, so I hope we can incorporate that into our conversation.

But Lihong, you know what we do here. We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you tell us what that is?

[Lihong] (1:23 - 2:55)

I'll tell you. AI customer success has been on my mind for a long time. Not only I talk about it, I also take some action and achieve some milestones.

And then we can talk about maybe what's up to come and get the idea. Customer success is usually at different stages, different kind of function. One of the common ones is that, oh, customer success is the extension of our product team.

It basically means you're a product. And then you need customer success to come to us, right? And it's kind of like that.

The thing is, people don't want to be onboarded in today's world, onboarded buyer, kind of a human being, and go through a lengthy, two-week, three-week onboarding process. Can we just do it quickly? And that requires your product to make it simple, easy, and AI can help with that.

I decided I want to change that. We used to have an onboarding process. I have a head of customer success.

Then I was like, I turned the head of customer success to head of product. I was like, you build the shit. If you build the shit that's difficult to use, then you onboard them.

If you don't want to do the manual work of onboarding, then build the product easy. And that was a huge incentive. And then we go from a two-call onboarding process to three clicks with AI.

And let me tell you, she asked me, how do you measure success? I said, as little clicks as possible. If possible, no keyboard.

And she did it. Three clicks, no keyboard. We're done.

So I make some milestone towards that. But customer success plays many roles, and there's more fun part that's about to come.

[Dillon] (2:56 - 3:25)

Yeah. I would agree that I don't think customer success should be involved in low-value tasks where possible. And a lot of onboarding is just that.

But I don't want to put my thumb on the scale. Anytime you talk about incentives, I feel like the first person I got to go to is Rob, because he's going to pull out one of his psychology textbooks. He'll probably start Googling some stuff real quick so he can throw out a hyphenated philosophy around psychology.

So Rob, what do you have for us today? What are you going to pull?

[Rob] (3:26 - 4:29)

Well, I'm not going to pull any philosophy or psychology around this necessarily this time yet. But I might after JP goes. Nothing's hit the noggin just yet.

No, actually, what I like what you mentioned, Lihong, was specifically you mentioned how AI or sorry, rather, that a lot of times we throw people at problems that are actually product problems. And the way that I see that a lot in my line of work is I work with a lot of really early stage companies. And they love this line, we do it doesn't scale and we figure out scale later.

And I like the spirit of that. Okay, yeah, do it doesn't scale, figure out what works and scale later. But the problem is people get caught in a trap.

They get caught with workflows they can't that are like really calcified and stuck in their day to days. They get caught with headcount that they don't know how to find a long term place for. And I think actually, that sort of mantra to me is changing now, where I think the benefit of what AI can bring to the table now is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

[Lihong] (4:29 - 5:02)

And we actually can look at problems like onboarding and do it scales first, which is so sorry, I think the customer success folks, because they're talking to customer every day, and they're doing the freaking repeatable onboarding process all the time, they know how to make an onboarding press goods. So it's like, rather than letting the customer success leader begging the product leaders, build those things, just let you handle it. Okay, you own it, you do it.

And I think it's good to give empower the CS leaders and let them do it. That's just the first step. But I think my vision of AI customer success is way more than this.

[Dillon] (5:03 - 5:27)

Another thing that just came to my mind, I think what you've done, Li Hong, in different words, is break down one of the primary silos. One of the primary barriers between two of the most closely related departments, customer success and product. That's a bit of a real time revelation I just had.

But before you go any deeper, I want to give JP a chance to offer his thoughts here too.

[JP] (5:28 - 5:45)

I mean, does it need to be said that you want to automate what can be automated? That's like the old adage, right? Automate what can be automated.

I think if you have a product that can be onboarded in three clicks, and that's all you need.

[Dillon] (5:45 - 5:46)

That's crazy.

[JP] (5:46 - 6:21)

By goodness, it should do it, right? It should only take the three clicks. And I think that that's a prime example of if your product can really be onboarded that quickly, then it should be.

I think I've definitely dealt with some products where I think that is complicated. But then there's some products where, and I know that we're talking more specifically, I think about product onboarding, not necessarily onboarding to the services that may come with what we're doing in CS or the resources that accompany, right? This is just really product focused, right?

[Lihong] (6:21 - 7:55)

Yeah, I guess the product onboarding, it's just a tiny step. It works only for digital touch, digital CS. And when you have a low one to many scale one, that's not interesting.

You have just a small revolution. What's really cool is if you can use AI to deliver personalized, amazing experience in the enterprise customer face, like people who pay me $1 million a year, I'm going to pamper them like nobody ever seen before. And you can actually do it with AI really well.

Imagine, okay, if you're the AI bot, like, okay, because each customer these days is very personalized. Each customer wants to be handled differently. Like, for example, I need to be blunt.

That person needs to be funny. You know, that person needs a lot of gift. People is unique, right?

The AI needs to recognize it. Imagine if I'm a CSM, I have a bot just for, let's say, Walmart. And then I can tell the bot, hey, my main contact is this guy.

He's this title. The budget holder, this guy, he's this. He has a dog he loves.

He has a daughter who goes into Kingdom Garden, all these personal stuff. And then I point AI to social listening of the company's big events in social media. So it's watching this company, these people, like you are their best friend, and then remind you like, hey, your main contact's daughter is about to have birthday coming up.

And last time, she really like the rainbow, some balloon you give them, remind you to order something ahead of time. Here's the address. That would be amazing.

Wouldn't it be awesome?

[Rob] (7:56 - 8:00)

That is awesome. I love that. It's like superpowers.

[Dillon] (8:01 - 8:20)

It is. And so it's funny, Lihong, because we just recently had a conversation about how AI is in many ways described in a way that feels magical to us. Particularly the older you are, you're like, oh, yeah.

Of course, that'd be nice.

[Lihong] (8:20 - 8:22)

Because we don't have memory. We don't have a good memory. Exactly.

[Dillon] (8:22 - 8:49)

But I think the way you, first of all, your passion makes me believe it more. I love the entire idea. But then I think the way in which you describe it is perfect because it is not set it and forget it.

It is not a solution that you stand up and walk away and nobody ever has to interact with it. It's meant to be a compliment. It's meant to make you supercharged.

That much better at your job. It's not meant to please you.

[Lihong] (8:49 - 9:19)

It's like an AI assistant that makes you supercharged. And you have, I think for the one million plus customers, you need to have one AI watching that one customer. One AI per customer, not one AI per CSM.

Because sometimes you exchange accounts all the time and the information got lost. So then you become, the CSM role becomes the trusted advisor, the expert of the industry, the friends. That's a world.

It's actually not that far away.

[Dillon] (9:20 - 9:54)

And it's what I refer to as you then get to spend the time thinking and strategizing. And you're not constantly writing all of your meeting notes down and trying to search the web for all the stuff that you have the AI doing. You get time to breathe and just be creative in a way that a lot of CSMs don't have the opportunity to do because they're stuck doing all of these low value tasks.

So this is incredible. I love it. That is our time, unfortunately.

Maybe we come back for a round two in a couple of weeks and you can tell us more about it. But for now, Lihong, we've got to say goodbye.

[Lihong] (9:55 - 10:16)

All right. Everyone, if you're interested, let me know. We're doing a Product Hunt today on August 26th. And if you want to check it out, and we do offer a 50% discount there. So you can get some good taste of AI, AI survey, or if you're just like, hi, I don't want to buy anything. I just want to see what AI survey look like.

You can take one there as well.

[Dillon] (10:17 - 10:19)

That's cool. Thank you so much, Lihong. We'll talk to you soon.

[Lihong] (10:20 - 10:21)

See you. Bye.

[Voiceover] (10:25 - 10:56)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value.

Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

Until next time.